MOSCOW, March 9. /TASS/. Research conducted in US laboratories in Ukraine corroborates US illegal and criminal activity in that Eastern European country, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told the Sputnik radio station on Wednesday commenting on the corresponding statement by US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.

"Yesterday, Victoria Nuland, in response to a question by American legislators, confirmed the existence of not just the laboratories in question but, as they actually call it, research. And she uttered a remarkable phrase - that is, the very body of evidence that was needed, which we now have - that they [the US] were doing everything so that these materials wouldn’t end up in Russia’s hands. We don’t have to guess what kind of materials those are, there is nothing to guess here anymore. These are the materials that prove the US’ illegal and criminal activity on Ukrainian soil," the diplomat said.

Earlier, Nuland said that Ukraine has facilities where biological research was being conducted and Washington was working to not let them fall into the hands of Russian forces.

Russia offered the US cooperation in the sphere of biological experiments yet their laboratories on post-Soviet territory are classified and were created to develop additional challenges and threats to Russia, the diplomat added.

"We were ready to send specialists, and delegations that consisted of the representatives of various agencies. All of this was shrouded in mystery, all of this was classified. Naturally, this did not imply any cooperation on their part, <...> because all of this was directed not towards developing responses to new challenges and threats but towards creating new challenges and threats directly against our country and against our population," she specified.

"If it is not stopped now, in the future it will all spin out of control and <...> will be brought to heel exclusively by those extremist forces that essentially, it seems to me, cannot even be brought to heel by themselves anymore, not to mention by anybody else," the spokeswoman added.

Earlier, Igor Kirillov, who heads the Russian army’s radiation, chemical and biological protection force, reported that a network of over 30 biological labs was formed on Ukrainian soil on the orders of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) of the US Department of Defense. According to him, on February 24, they were all instructed by the Ukrainian Health Ministry to completely destroy biological agents located in the laboratories.